All Eyes West: Why Nation-Building Projects Keep Landing in British Columbia

All Eyes West: Why Nation-Building Projects Keep Landing in British Columbia

Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney toured the Port of Vancouver's Deltaport terminal and confirmed the federal government is looking to invest more than $10 billion to expand it, saying the port's current capacity won't be enough to meet the country's trade goals within a decade. The visit built on a broader framework: the Canada-British Columbia Cooperative Prosperity Agreement, signed in Vancouver on July 2, which also commits up to $3 billion toward replacing the George Massey Tunnel, federal funding for the Red Chris Mine Expansion, and support for the North Coast Transmission Line. Together, they're a concrete sign of a broader shift: new U.S. tariffs, ongoing geopolitical instability, and a push to remove barriers to trade between Canada's own provinces have underscored that the country needs to build major infrastructure faster, and needs new markets for what it produces.

Nation-building projects, the major infrastructure and natural resource developments capable of reshaping regional and national economies, are central to that effort. They support Canada's economic sovereignty and help the country grow into a more independent, diversified trading nation that isn't reliant on any single partner.

Solving for Speed

Major projects in Canada have long moved slowly, even after they were approved. Getting from approval to construction could take a decade or more, often because a project needed sign-off from multiple levels of government running separate, overlapping reviews. The federal government created the Major Projects Office (MPO) in September 2025 to change that, working toward a "one project, one review" standard under the Building Canada Act. In less than a year, its list has grown from an initial 11 projects to today's slate of 18 major projects and 8 transformative strategies, spanning ports, pipelines, mines, transmission lines and clean energy corridors across the country.

British Columbia's Outsized Share

British Columbia's presence on that list is disproportionate. Of the 28 projects and strategies the MPO currently supports, at least seven are anchored here:

• Ksi Lisims LNG (referred project) — Pearse Island, on B.C.'s northern coast. An Indigenous-led floating LNG terminal developed with the Nisg̱a'a Nation, on track to become Canada's second-largest LNG export facility.
• LNG Canada Phase 2 (referred project) — Kitimat, B.C. A doubling of the existing LNG Canada export terminal, led by a Shell-headed joint venture and expected to draw roughly $33 billion in private investment.
• North Coast Transmission Line (referred project) — Prince George to Terrace and Bob Quinn, northwest B.C. A BC Hydro transmission upgrade that will more than double clean electricity capacity along the north coast, powering LNG and mining projects in the region.
• Red Chris Mine Expansion (referred project) — near Iskut, in B.C.'s Golden Triangle. A copper and gold mine expansion developed with the Tahltan Nation, expected to lift Canada's annual copper production by more than 15 per cent.
• Roberts Bank Terminal 2 (referred project) — Delta, B.C. A new three-berth container terminal at the Port of Vancouver, led by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, that would increase the port's container capacity by nearly 50 per cent.
• Port of Vancouver Gateway Strategy (transformative strategy) — Delta and Metro Vancouver, B.C. An overarching strategy to expand the port's container, bulk terminal and rail capacity system-wide, of which Roberts Bank Terminal 2 is the leading component.
• Northwest Critical Conservation Corridor (transformative strategy) — northwest B.C. and southern Yukon. A strategy pairing mining and energy development in the Golden Triangle with new conservation areas, developed with the Nisg̱a'a, Tahltan, Gitxsan, Tsetsaut Skii Km Lax Ha and Gitanyow.

Alberta's proposed West Coast Oil Pipeline, which would terminate on our coast, could arguably count as an eighth. The federal government has begun the process to designate the pipeline as a project of national interest. B.C.'s Minister of Jobs and Economic Growth, Ravi Kahlon, has put the province's share even higher, saying that roughly 40 per cent of federal priority projects are located here, a concentration no other province or territory comes close to matching.

Momentum from Look West

Federal funding isn’t the only thing stimulating growth across British Columbia. Look West, the province's own economic strategy, launched in November 2025 with a goal of speeding up permitting, growing the skilled workforce and attracting major investment across the province. The results back it up. B.C. now has $88 billion in proposed major projects on track to move forward over the next three years, and the province has nearly doubled its own, separate list of priority projects, from 18 to 35, on its way to a 10-year goal of $200 billion in private investment. Permitting has moved with it: five major mines, including Quintette, Highland Valley Copper, Mount Milligan, Eskay Creek and Copper Mountain, have been permitted since launch, representing nearly $4 billion in combined investment, with Eskay Creek's reopening alone taking nine months from application to decision, more than 40 per cent faster than the province's previous timelines. B.C. is backing that pace with people, too, doubling trades training funding to $214 million a year by 2028-29, the first major increase in skilled trades investment in nearly 20 years.

A Duty Beyond Our Borders

Not every project on this list can move on provincial authority alone. The Port of Vancouver's Roberts Bank Terminal 2, led by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, needed federal backing to advance despite sitting entirely within B.C. That backing arrived in stages: the project was referred to the MPO in mid-July, and Carney confirmed more than $10 billion in federal investment during his visit to the port last week. The same Cooperative Prosperity Agreement that set that funding in motion also commits up to $3 billion toward replacing the George Massey Tunnel, the Highway 99 crossing that moves goods between the port and the rest of B.C. That project has had a rockier road: the province recently ended its contract with the original construction consortium and revised the budget to $8.5 billion, with completion now expected in 2031. Even so, the federal commitment treats the crossing as part of the same trade corridor as the port itself.

The stakes go beyond our province: B.C.'s ports are also how landlocked provinces reach tidewater and the rest of the world, which puts a duty on British Columbia to keep that gateway open and competitive. Nutrien, the Saskatchewan-based fertilizer giant, recently opted to invest up to $1 billion in a new export terminal in Washington State rather than expand through Vancouver, citing congestion and productivity concerns at the port. Federal Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon called the decision "hard to digest," and it's one of the reasons Roberts Bank is moving now.

Everything Is Connected

Many of these projects also depend on each other in ways that aren't always obvious. Ksi Lisims LNG and the Red Chris Mine Expansion, both in the province's northwest, are advancing alongside BC Hydro's North Coast Transmission Line, which will more than double clean electricity capacity in the region, because neither an LNG facility nor a mine can operate without power. An LNG terminal is only as viable as the pipeline supplying its feedgas, too. That's why Enbridge's roughly $4-billion Sunrise expansion of the province's gas transmission system, approved this spring, matters as much to LNG Canada's Phase 2 prospects as the transmission line does to Ksi Lisims and Red Chris.

British Columbia’s Moment

Seven or more of the Major Projects Office's 28 active files, spanning LNG, mining, transmission and port infrastructure, are located in British Columbia and moving at the same time. No other province has that many projects in motion at once.

That concentration matters for two reasons. British Columbia holds a natural endowment of critical minerals and natural gas that few other provinces can match, next to a coastline built for trade with the fastest-growing markets in the world. It also carries an obligation: much of the rest of Canada depends on B.C.'s coastline to reach global markets, which gives the rest of the country a direct stake in how quickly we build.

What happens next depends on follow-through. Indigenous consultations, financing decisions and permitting still stand between most of these projects and construction, and the pace the province has set so far will need to hold. As Ottawa and Victoria continue to align their priorities, B.C. businesses have a direct stake in seeing that momentum carry through, and in making the case for why it should.